Song and Video by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.
[after a whirlwind trip through my life stateside i am taking the redeye back tonight and feeling reflective and happy, happy like a stoned dog]
from a spoken interlude 2/3 through the song:
Him: Do you remember that day you fell out of my window? Her: I sure do, you came jumping out after me. Him: Well you fell on the concrete, nearly broke your ass, you were bleeding all over the place and I rushed you off to the hospital, you remember that? Her: Yes I do Him: Well there’s something I never told you about that night Her: What didn’t you tell me Him: While you were sitting in the backseat smoking a cigarette you thought was gonna be your last, I was falling deep, deeply in love with you, and I never told you till just now.
Sometimes all of life feels this way. No one can strum the chord the way Rosie can, either. It makes me glad that she found this song for herself.
Two thousand nine was a big year: it brought both a renewed sense of stability and a whole slew of adventure. As the calendar ticks over to a new decade, I reprise the venerable tradition – inherited from Jason Kottke – of cataloguing the year by its places. One or more nights spent in each city, asterisks denote places to which I returned. Links to the relevant flickr photos where available.
It occurs to me that this blog’s new title is Community, and I found that word echoing in my head last night as I asked a question at Union Theological Seminary’s “mega-class.” Following are my question and Dr. Serene Jones’ response – I addressed the question to her because, after hearing the fabulous Gary Dorrien answer a half dozen questions on the AIG bailout, I wanted some theology. Also, I’m transcribing - and not linking to the video podcast of the course - because this way I get to edit my incoherence.
Q: Professor Dorrien said that neoclassical capitalism pays no heed to community, and that economic democracy is a brake on human greed. It seems that those two work together: community may curb greed, and greed harms community, right?
But on the human level, it wasn’t [Reagan-era] globalization that destroyed that community, it was industrialization and the ability to simply buy something from two towns away.
As Christians, we feel this anachronistic call to a community that began to decline with modernity itself. What do we say to a world which lacks the sort of robust community that can curb our sinfulness, curb our greed?
Serene Jones: Community is an interesting term because, like many of the things we’ve been discussing, community isn’t inherently a progressive or positive space. You can have really corrupt forms of community and when you get corruption going in deep, communal ways, it’s bad. So we can’t just sort of invoke community as if it’s a nostalgic, utopic space somewhere that if we just got reconnected to one another, we’d be alright.
But what I do think your question points to is that this is all transpiring in the context of a world populated by people who still have very fundamental desires for intimacy, for connection, for being seen and being known, for being held and being loved and being fed. Again and again, if those sort of basic truths that the Christian story lifts up in profound ways stay at the center of our reflection on this, then we stop thinking that we’re dealing with human beings who are creatures other than these kinds of creatures, and we stop thinking as if these systems have a life of their own and [realize] they’re systems that these kinds of people with these kinds of needs have generated. Then we keep coming back to the earth of our existence as the place in which we are most likely to find – not always the most immediately practical answer – but we will get the impulses and the desires that point us in the right direction when it comes to articulating those policies.
In one regard, Dr. Jones fixated on my use of the word “community,” when I was really trying to recall the broader litany of grievances Prof. Dorrien raised against “neoclassical capitalism.” However, inasmuch as I was trying to say, “we Christians want this deeper thing than a post/modern world has ever offered,” she rightly took me down several notches in reminding me that community is anything but a “nostalgic, utopic space somewhere.”
I think my choice of that particular word is unwittingly rather revealing; any who know me can attest to my deep reverence for relationships and the often sabotaging ways in which I can elevate the role of community.
The body of her answer, though, gets to the heart of why I feel called to seminary of all things. I’ve been fiddling around, trying to find what felt like a rationally sound way to simply say, “Christianity tells a story of truth.” A story, where analytic philosophy simply strikes out at the thing. Embodied as we are in time and place, aren’t humans always entangled in the story of our lives more than any Platonic forms?
Dr. Jones’ answer exemplifies that growing conviction of mine, that the Christian story pushes back against our willful belief that, “we’re dealing with human beings who are creatures other than these kinds of creatures [who have orchestrated the current economic catastrophe], and we stop thinking as if these systems have a life of their own.” Scripture is so troublesome, but humanity is still more so. I find a truth in the way the Christian story contains so much, and wraps all of it in God’s love and justification.
I explain myself these days by saying that I head to Union to give myself to God. Said less biblically, I go to recognize that my life is not my own. It may be God’s (I’m beginning to believe so), or it may just belong to fate, nature, the soil. That giving up makes increasingly little practical sense as job prospects dwindle in this economy, but I find the end of Dr. Jones’ answer deeply affirming. Places such as Union, study such as this, may “not always [be] the most immediately practical answer – but we will get the impulses and the desires that point us in the right direction when it comes to articulating [just] policies.”
I am eager to spend a few years seeking to form those impulses.
I wonder what it is that I feel so connected to David Foster Wallace’s own search for ontological clarity and meaning and yet guard my life with much more jealousy than it seems he ever did. By which I mean simply: he always understood something about the idea of suicide as a “solution” to deep metaphysical unrest that I doubt I’ll ever be able to fathom. I am so enamored of incarnation that I can’t stand to lose it; in D.T. Max’s telling, he was always destined to sink beneath the weight of life’s intransigencies.
His IQ was probably 60 points higher than mine, for one. He perceived (and created) with an insight and poignancy I’ll never know. Does identifying with him allow me to believe I see genius in myself? Is it an effort to exorcise the fear that with middling, unfocussed giftedness I am entirely unremarkable; that my discernment is completely of this age and nothing more?
This past year has been brewing a search for the marrow of things, or at least meaning in my life. Now I’m off to seminary, and it is explicitly a crucible of ontological engagement: I go to put aside my earthly machinations for a time, to make sense of a grander muddle. I need to commit to writing my racing thoughts these days, as middling and potentially redundant as they may be. I like the idea of serializing my reasons for enrolling at Union Theological Seminary for concerned friends and family, but also because the project will help me to sort and begin to make sense of the understandings and longings I bring to this undertaking.
I’m getting at something, is the point, and though it won’t be pretty for a while, I’ll give it a go anyhow. If you want to follow along you are welcome to watch this space.
Reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, I was impressed by how well America’s preeminent theologian foretold something like 2003 from 1933. To wit,
[Modern men of power] may still engage in social conflict for the satisfaction of their pride and vanity provided they can compound their personal ambitions with, and hallow them by, the ambitions of their group, and the pitiful vanities and passions of the individuals who compose the group.
Niebuhr demands an account of the “vanities and passions” which led us to war in our time; I suspect that even the staunchest of doves among us have a bit of reckoning to do there.
Two more stories of prescience. I rode over the hill from Social Work to Union Theological Seminary, thinking on this text and on Niebuhr’s prescience, and remembered my own occasion to peer into the future as a boy with a new bike.
I was having a great deal of trouble getting my feet into the clip-and-strap pedals on my new town fixie. After years of racing on clipless pedals, it was minutes-long struggle to find the rhythm necessary to get my shoes into the straps in rhythm with the spinning cranks. “Go on ahead!” I’d shout to friends as I turned in wobbling circles, staring at my feet with gritted teeth. I thought,
This is awful, but in six months I’ll be able to slip into these without hardly thinking about it, and it will be great to look back on this time.
And of course it was true. Run, jump, kick in, off we go on a green light before the cars even get rolling. I love that memory of prescience, of anticipation for the proficiency and joy to come.
Last story. We’re riding over the hill again, in the rain, to Seminary and the peace it brings. Thinking of prescience and another memory comes dripping back in, a long-forgotten one from the First Church mission trip to Colima, Mexico. From my laughably abbreviated journal,
It’s late & dark on the steps outside the girls’ apartment, but the night is the most beautiful - beautiful thing, no less noisy & a little bit warmer than home but somehow transcendent & distinctly of this time & place. Maybe for once I can see it in the moment - this will be a time whose smells, tastes, little triggers of whispers of memories will bring me vividly back. Or perhaps not, but here we are now.
Brakes squeaking over wet bicycle rims on a New York City street, it was precisely a year later - to the day - that my moment of meta-prescience had recurred, and indeed, smells and words do triggers memories of that time. The smells and godliness of Union bring me back, as does a good quesadilla or a Negro Modelo.
Molly was in town this weekend; dinner with she and Rafe and others last night and that most certainly brought me back. She gave me this most knowing of glances as dinner wound down and I wonder about her own prescience, prodding me along to Seminary. All of this discernment feels a fumbling task now (“Go on ahead!”), but maybe in a few years, I’ll look back just the same? The future can hardly be known, but when I have gotten quiet to think about it, it has usually served me well. Up, over the hill we go.
Reprising last year’s meme, here is my year in cities. Alas, no foreign travel for me in 2007, though I did get around the northeast pretty handily - I guess that is what comes from a summer spent back in Boston. Our low-budget spring break road trip through California barely registers here, with only a night at Rosie’s down in San Diego and a few nights at my house in the Bay Area. The San Francisco visit was New Year’s Eve, but we’re counting it for 2007.
Asterisks again denote multiple visits, minimum one night in any city. I’m linking to flickr photos in a given location from the year, and the Google Map above is a fancy new addition. (I’ve always been an innovator). Onward!
Predictions for 2008: I will definitely have found a new home when I graduate and the lease runs out this summer, and let’s just say: I bet it won’t require a new addition to this list.
